Macrocognition

A macro-theory is a theory which is concerned with the obvious regularities of human experience, rather than with some theoretically defined unit. To refer to another psychological school, it would correspond to a theory at the level of Gestalten. It resembles Newell’s suggestion for a solution that would analyse more complex tasks, although the idea of a macro-theory does not entail an analysis of the mechanistic materialistic kind which is predominant in cognitive psychology. Thus we should have a macro-theory of remembering rather than of memory, to say nothing of short-term memory, proactive inhibition release, or memory scanning. To take another example, we should have a macro-theory of attending, rather than a mini-theory of attention, or micro-theories of limited channel capacities or logarithmic dependencies in disjunctive reaction times. This would ease the dependence on the information processing analogy, but not necessarily lead to an abandonment of the information processing terminology, the Flowchart, or the concept of control structures. The meta-technical sciences can contribute to a psychology of cognition as well as to cognitive psychology. What should be abandoned is rather the tendency to think in elementaristic terms and to increase the plethora of mini-and micro-theories.
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To conclude, if the psychological study of cognition shall have a future that is not a continued description of human information processing, its theories must be at what we have called the macro-level. This means that they must correspond to the natural units of experience and consider these in relation to the regularities of human experience, rather than as manifestations of hypothetical information processing mechanisms in the brain. A psychology should start at the level of natural units in human experience and try to work upwards towards the level of functions and human action, rather than downwards towards the level of elementary information processes and the structure of the IPS.